Where the Huckleberries Grow Okay, now, this is "blogging": For the record, we went to Tombstone on Sunday. Finally, after threatening (for months) to impose my considerable bulk and heft upon The Town Too Tough To Die, we made the road trip. We went under the white flag of tourism, which is unfortunately no longer a guarantee of safety in this world. But I can't write this stuff off, so that meant no probing questions about the Minutemen. It also meant not carrying a gun. Despite the best intentions of the Earp brothers, people still wear their guns in Tombstone. Other than the numerous stage actors that litter the old streets, there are quite a few citizens who are as free with their firearms as we are in Phoenix. We even perused the local gun store, where I looked at a black-powder .44 that could be obtained for fifty dollars, with no background check or paperwork (I managed to restrain myself). Oh, today's cowboys do have to check their weapons at the door, according to signs in some of the shops. So civilization has survived the modern age somewhat. Since it did, we felt pretty good about sprinkling a few bucks around the place, because other than tourism, what will they do? Unless they suddenly strike a new vein in the silver mines, the town's lifeblood has to roll in on wheels from elsewhere, just like seafood does. So we bought a few sundries. I've always wanted one of those "dusters", the long denim coats that you see in Westerns. It turns out they have two kinds; one is patterned from the original, and then there is its more expensive contemporary cousin, which is made in Australia. I bought the traditional style, which doesn't have the big cloak-thing on the back. It's a sure bet to draw some long stares at the airport. My sweetheart also bought me a baseball cap with a picture of Val Kilmer (who she loves) as "Doc" Holliday above the visor, emblazoned with his slogan, "I'm Your Huckleberry." That'll be great at the employee golf tournament this fall. We took a few pictures, which I might post up here, and I might not. The best one is of yours truly standing next to the signpost marking the spot where "Curly Bill" Brocius killed Marshall Fred White in 1880, just about a year before the gunfight at the OK Corral. And no, we didn't take the OK Corral tour. We didn't do Boot Hill, either. Why not? Well, that's a sticking point with me. The men and women who settled this land - stole it from the Indians, really - were a hard lot. They swore, they spat, they drank, they smoked, they fought, they screwed, they gambled and they killed each other. Precisely such coarse-grained folk were required to secure that first foothold in the Arizona territory. If you haven't been here, you cannot imagine... But those people weren't from Tombstone. Mostly, they weren't even from Arizona. They came from everywhere else to forge their destinies (like they still do, like I did in '96). It isn't romantic; it's insane. But by living there, they had to die there, and that's where they are buried. And I'll be damned if I'm going to saunter through some gift shop or buy a ticket just to walk over their graves, or smack gum where they died in their boots. That's something I just won't do, out of respect. The most fun came after we bought our last souvenir in Tombstone, which was a tank of gas. Gas is cheaper in Tombstone than in Phoenix. The thunder and lightning had already made themselves known to all, so we were racing the lead edge of the storm. Like a posse, it caught up to us within minutes, with an attitude that was as lethal as a hail of lead. It rained like it did the night Morg Earp was killed (in the movie, anyway). The road that connects you back to the freeway, called "The Eighty", is fun to drive on. It's fun to drive on until the road becomes swamped with sheets of rain and everyone panics and pulls off to the shoulder (which is fine, except that there really isn't much of a shoulder there). We drove on, figuring there was no possible way that the people in front of us would be stupid enough to cross a running wash. We were wrong, of course, all wrong... But we got through those few flooded spots and pushed on out of the storm. But, as luck usually has it, "The Eighty" took a leftward turn, and the storm hooked right, catching us again right as we were getting onto I-10, where blinding rain will simply not do, due to the fact that everyone is going eighty. We put our stock in the V8 Ford, and flat outran the downpour. From there on, it's pretty simple. You roll through The Old Pueblo, slingshot around the Ostrich Farm and up into the Belly of the Beast. We had to get home in good time, to let the dogs out before they decided we had given them no choice but to desecrate the carpet. Back in the Valley, there was no rain at all, and naturally, the temperatures were much higher. Not as humid, though. Paul Heller 7/25/05 << back to the archives
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